The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Basic Instinct II. So, Sharon Stone has the dubious honour of becoming a star and completely destroying that star power with the exact same fucking role. It's not that she got typecast, it's that she made a mega-successful film, and 14 years later, she made a sequel that was so bad it more or less tanked her career. Of the 28 films she released after this, I recognised the titles of six of them, and of those four, The Disaster Artist was the only one I had seen. Only 10 have had enough viewers for a Rotten Tomatoes score, and, surprisingly, the only two with overall fresh ratings, TDA and Rolling Thunder Revue, aren't even on her page. So, what happened with the sequel? Well, there's one big scene from the film that literally everyone who knows the film remembers:

---

---

Unfortunately, in this film, she never recreates that scene. I checked the Celebrity Movie Archive, and the closest thing to it is a deleted scene where she walks around braless in a wet T-shirt. But, you may be asking, surely there's more to this movie's failure than that. Right? Well, let's look into it:

• About a minute's worth of logos to start with. Always a good sign.
  
• She's going out of her way to romance this guy who's barely conscious, and even masturbating... while she's driving. Good thing London isn't one of the most populated cities in the world with a lot of traffic, otherwise, this would have ended badly even before she decided to swerve into that glass Coke add into the Thames.
  
• Wow. It's almost like she's not even trying to create a level of plausible deniability when she's murdering her paramours. Or even creating an opportunity to show off her pantyless crotch like in the last film, since she's actually wearing trousers.
  
• During a lull, I managed to find the trailer, and I can see this a movie:
  
  
  From this trailer, I expect a movie with a good balance of sex, and a thrilling (if obviously kinda preposterous, especially given that the original film was written to be the lowest common denominator for an erotic thriller and still became the highest-selling screenplay at the time) plot. Meanwhile, at the 30-minute mark, the only real sexy scene was the opening, and even in that case, I was more distracted by how baffling it was. There's a couple potential places for a pantyless upskirt shot, but no. It's all just plot.  And that plot is basically just a retread of the first, except instead of an LA cop, it's a London forensic psychiatrist, and Catherine's giving less of a shit. Also, one of the producers is named Andrew G. Vajna. Presumably no relation there.
• Huge lines at a bookstore. Anyone else feel the nostalgia? Both for heavily populated bookstores and the ability to actually stay in there?
  
• Oh, look, a potentially sexy scene of her rubbing one foot on another that's shot a lot more prosaically than the trailer would suggest. And to think that by this point in the original, we got to know every square centimeter of her pussy. And even as a foot fetishist, we don't even get a good enough shot for it to work as spank material, willfully sexy shoes aside. It's rather telling that Kate Winslet as a Birkenstock-wearing mum in Little Children does more for me than this scene. Also, she's usually barefoot at home in the first film, and in the second, she never is.
  
• And 38 minutes in, the protagonist is fucking Catherine Trammell. And every time I see his face, it looks like he's a couple seconds away from throwing up. Or at least asking for a dramamine. Sharon Stone looks incredible for her age. So why can't I watch this scene without thinking "this is probably what the Prime Minister in The National Anthem had to go through when he fucked the pig"? That's the last thing I should be thinking about for this movie.
  
• Why is he not familiar with autoerotic asphyxiation? I knew about it by that point and I was a 16-year old who'd never even spoken to a girl like I was interested in her.
  
• She's teasing him about potentially murdering the autoerotic guy while they're not even sure what's happening. There's a trope for that and it's interesting to note that Drawn Together in its most reviled season, managed to play it smarter than this film in "Drawn Together Babies."
  
• And she's doing a Christine Keeler pose, creating yet another missed opportunity for a snatch shot. I know I've been harping on the missed opportunity for some sexy shit, but A) it was a crucial part of the first film's success, B) you promised something similar to the first film in the trailer, and C) the non-sexual parts are giving me so little to work with.
  
• You can't lock someone up just because you think they might do something? Well, she's been suspected in at least two murders in the film's runtime alone, the psychologist in the first case described her as having very textbook psychopathic symptoms, and, if The Psychopath Test is any indication, in the UK, that should very well be enough for a one-way ticket to Broadmoor. Of course, Tony was probably convicted in the first place.
  
• And why is he surprised she's into some really kinky sex? He fucked her, and one of the murders she's suspected of imitates a rather notorious kink.
  

• Let me guess, Not-Robert-Smith isn't actually German IRL.
  
• Also, I just noticed that we're about two-thirds of the way through and the brief scenes of him buying her book and the protagonist looking at it, plus maybe a couple scattered references to her writing aside, the fact that she's a novelist plays shockingly little of a part. In the original, it's a crucial plot point. It may be preposterous that a serial killer would kill someone and write their deaths into their best-selling novels afterward, and it is probably the most fundamental plot hole in the first film. But to repeatedly ignore it like they do in the sequel film just creates an even bigger plot hole, since, as of the beginning of the first film, she's a suspect in at least five deaths, and before and after, she's in the public eye. Does NOBODY in Scotland Yard know about her history? And they say that she's been suspected in two deaths at one point. Just two, and neither one exists outside the confines of this film. To reiterate: This best-selling novelist with a known possible body count. They have to ask the SFPD for information by the last fifth of the film for information that would, in a sane world, at least be on her Wikipedia page. Hell, even Bill Cosby's Wikipedia page mentioned the sexual assault claims in 2006 before Hannibal Burress brought it out into the open. And the circumstances would almost certainly merit more than three sentences, even if it never got past the indictment stage. Hell, O.J. Simpson's been suspected of two murders and it all but totally ruined his career, even after he was found not guilty.
  
• ...And not only do we not see Sharon Stone recreate the famous scene from the first film, she actually wears panties in this film.
  
  
  
• And the big twist is that he's written him into the book as the killer and not herself...
  

And next week is going to be The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure